I have blogged repeatedly about options for campesino. None of them are great wihch is why I tend to import it. It's a concept that just doesn't translate well since it includes not only family or small-scale farmers but also farmworkers, loggers, artisanal miners, and lots of other people that live in the campo. I liked the way this great article (that helped me see how we need to look both above and below the land to understand land issues in Colombia) went back and forth between using small-scale farmer and campesino throughout, though again, that leaves a lot of people out.
My compa Kath Nygard has lately been trying to convince me to use peasant. As I've blogged before, it's worth nothing that the Via Campesina uses International Peasant Movement as their official translation. I don't think I'm quite there yet, since the connotations in English seem still too closely tied to Monty Python type peasants (see video).
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3 comments:
no good options. I use rural citizens, dwellers, and farmers... I agree that campesino should probably be part of the English language at this point.
oooh, I like that option, thanks for sharing Nico! abrazo
another good one I heard lately: subsistence farmer. misses the folks that aren't farmers, but I like it better than the family farmer Witness was using.
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